The video game turning teens into millionaires has raised a whopping $150 million, making it a $2.5 billion company

Roblox, a massively popular video game with 70 million
monthly active players, has raised $150 million at a valuation
of over $2.5 billion.

Incidentally, $2.5 billion is also how much Microsoft
paid for Mojang, the creator of Minecraft - which is seen as
one of Roblox's chief rivals.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki says that the money
will go into helping develop Roblox into what he calls a new
form of "human co-experience."

Roblox, a
massively popular video game with 70 million monthly active
players, has raised a whopping $150 million in a funding round
led by Greylock Partners and Tiger Global Management.

Ad

While Roblox didn't disclose terms of the deal, we're told by a
person familiar with the situation that the company is now valued
at over $2.5 billion. All told, Roblox has raised $185 million in
funding.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki tells Business Insider that while
the company is "solidly profitable," the company needs the money
to invest in some big capital expenditures, including
technological infrastructure and further international expansion.
The ultimate goal is to take Roblox past its origins as a game
and into a whole new form of entertainment.

"Gaming is a part of it, but we see this as much bigger
than that," says Baszucki.

Ad

Roblox is often compared to Minecraft, the international
phenomenon that Microsoft purchased in 2014. This fundraising is
only likely to accelerate those comparisons: $2.5 billion is both
Roblox's new valuation, and the amount that Microsoft paid for
Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft.

But those similarities are really only skin deep. In reality,
Roblox is more of a marketplace than a game - unlike its rivals,
Roblox is almost entirely created by its users. All 40
million Roblox games, including popular ones like "Meep
City" and "Jailbreak," were made by its base of mostly
younger independent developers. If a player chooses to spend the
premium virtual Robux currency - which costs real money - in a
game, the developer gets a cut.

When it comes to those grand ambitions, Baszucki says that
he doesn't pay much mind to other games on the market. To his
mind, it's "less of a competitive landscape, and more of a vision
and execution landscape."

To be more specific, Baszucki envisions Roblox as a new
platform for "human co-experience." Some people are using Roblox
to play soccer, or shooting games, or racing games. Others,
though, are using it for roleplaying, education, and other
"experiences" that can teach positive life skills to Roblox's
largely younger users.

This is the real potential for Roblox, says Baszucki.
Roblox is already where kids go to hang out with their friends
online - and he wants to expand it even further into a
full-fledged virtual universe, where kids go not just to game,
but to build, create, and generally interact, the same as they
would in the real world, only accelerated by technology.

"[Kids] tend to see their reality as both digital and the
real world, and move pretty freely between them," says Baszucki.
"They're making their own rules."

Recode reported that Roblox was raising a round valued at
about $2.5 billion back in June.